Punished for Success?

Hey, do you like to get punished for success? Me neither. But how would you like to get punished for success – and you didn’t even have much of it in the first place? Well, a lot of Elvenar players might be in that boat between Summer Mermaids and Autumn Zodiac events…

There is a lot of angst on Elvenar forums. I mean, there is a lot of angst there in general, but the most recent event – Autumn Zodiac – triggered something special. I haven’t seen that many unhappy people there in quite a while – if ever. Many long-term players are registering on the forums for the first time to express how they feel. And I haven’t seen a lot of positive feedback to offset that.

Now, I won’t be summarizing all the issues and concerns with this event in this post. If you want, you can head to these feedback threads (consider yourself warned):

https://beta.forum.elvenar.com/index.php?threads/autumn-zodiac.13647

https://en.forum.elvenar.com/index.php?threads/autumn-zodiac.10777/

https://us.forum.elvenar.com/index.php?threads/autumn-zodiac-event-feedback.20926/

Why changes?

Let’s just say that a primary reason for making a lot of changes for the Autumn Zodiac event was that allegedly players did extremely well in the previous event – Summer Mermaids, where evolving Mermaid Paradise and its Artifacts were the grand prizes.

And there is no doubt that some people did well in that event. It was no secret on the forums. And if these same high-performers would be nerf-targeted in the new event, I probably wouldn’t even think about it twice. But as it stands, the new event rules hit pretty much everyone hard. So this analysis was triggered by this post on the Beta forum:

…really, I think this tweaks are just a little disturbance for the hard core players, while a big punishment for the casual players = total miss

maxiqbert

Exactly. Instead of focusing on capping the top-performing outliers (not sure why it would be necessary, but whatever), this event hammers everyone hard – and probably more so the majority of players who may not have the same capacity (and/or desire) to adjust. But was it even necessary? The claim was that the radical changes in this event were prompted by unprecedented player success in the Mermaid event. And we all may be jaded a bit reading forum posts by active players who apparently managed to win big. But how representative was this sample size of probably a few dozen players?

Mermaid Paradise Levels

So I did some datamining on US servers (8 servers, about 250K cities total, slightly less than 70K “active” – i.e. with a recent score change, tiny ones excluded), and I looked at the total Mermaid Paradise levels placed in all these “active” cities. Here is how distribution looks like:

So, more than half the cities in question had no MPs placed at all. More than 99% of all these cities had no more than a single L10 MP (a lot had a single underdeveloped MP, these 43% are not all L10). This leaves us with less than 1% of active cities who managed to place more than a single L10 MP. Out of these, only 0.13% managed to place more than 2x L10 MPs. To be more specific, out of 70K cities we’re talking about 60 cities with L21-30, 13 cities with L31-40, 7 cities with L41-50, 7 cities with L51-60, and a single city with 11x L10 MPs (special circumstances, not repeatable performance). Quite a few of these cities spent at least some diamonds to get where they’ve got.

Of course, it is possible that there are hundreds or thousands of players just sitting on the unplaced MPs in the inventory, but I find it hard to believe (no way to check for that externally). Moreso, until someone places these prizes in their city they have no impact on the game (well, except as a source of fragments, but this is really not a game changer).

Again, take a look at the distribution above. Is this how “excessive success” worth being punished for looks like? 

You decide.